EVOLUTION 947 



to finding new wa\^s of making the best of the outer perianth which 

 remained ? 



Illustrations of the reverse oscillation, from floral to vegetative, are 

 more common. Recall the genus Helianthus, culminating for garden 

 magnificence in the great sun-flowers, and yet so vegetatively 

 exuberant in the kitchen-garden as "Jerusalem (girasole) artichoke" 

 {H. tuber osus), with its subterranean wealth of potato-like tubers: 

 so that in northern gardens it hardly ever flowers at all, and even 

 in warmer midland France its flowers are late, and comparatively 

 few and small. Is not this like the spendthrift turned to miser? A 

 yet extremer contrast is that presented in the genus Asparagus, of 

 which the common species, cultivated in Indian gardens, bears such 

 exuberant wealth of white flowers wreathing the veranda columns 

 as to show no foliage at all: while our European kitchen-garden 

 species, cultivated for its succulent young shoots, grows up into 

 verdant beauty, with only few and inconspicuous flowers. Yet these, 

 on examination, betray the curious history that the apparent leaves 

 are really flower-pedicels, on which the flowers all fail, while the 

 true leaves below them are reduced to minute dry scales. Here have 

 we not a fresh light on the variation process — that exaggeration of 

 floral exuberance in a species or variety may tend to go too far, 

 even to danger of extinction by overbalance; and yet that balance 

 may in such cases sometimes be retrieved, and even towards the 

 reverse extreme, that of the vegetative habit markedly predominant ? 

 And conversely also; for there are plants of such vegetative habit 

 as sometimes to endanger, or almost lose, reproductive continuance 

 by flowers. Yet this with less danger, since vigorous vegetative 

 growth tends to asexual multiplication, as by creeping shoots, 

 even to subterranean tubers, etc., or to vegetative inflorescence, as 

 with various not uncommon grasses. 



Space forbids the development of this line of interpretation 

 throughout many of the orders of the botanic garden — and, indeed, 

 of that far vaster Hortus Siccus, the herbarium. The recurrence of 

 such oscillatory variation may be easily traced by the reader in 

 either of these: and, indeed, the like extensively throughout the 

 animal kingdom as well, as through gallery after gallery of the 

 Natural History Museum; since recurrent in many varieties, species 

 and genera, orders and classes. 



Instead, however, of here further elaborating this, in the vast 

 fields of Taxonomy, with which one might fill a volume, let us 

 rather note how this mode of interpretation throws fresh light on 

 other matters hitherto more morphologically or more mechanically 

 interpreted, however truly enough so far. Take, for instance, the 

 so-called "invaginated" inflorescence we know as the common fig, 

 with its florets so completely enclosed; since, as all botanists agree, 

 its original embrj^onic apex has been so fully overgrown by the 



